Dakota warrior's remains buried with honor

MORTON, Minn. {AP} Almost 138 years after his execution, the remains of Dakota Indian warrior leader Marpiya Okinajin, or He Who Stands in the Clouds, have ben buried with all the honors due a chief.

Perhaps better known as Cut Nose, he was one of 38 Indians hanged in Mankato on Dec. 26, 1862, following the Dakota Conflict.

Jim Jones, a member of the Leech Lake Band of Chippewa and cultural resource specialist for the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council, brought the remains home from Michigan for a recent private burial near this western Minnesota town. Several Indian nations sent representatives.

As head of the Dakota warrior society at the time of the 1862 uprising, Cut Nose would have been elevated by the conflict to status as a chief, Jones said, and he deserved burial with the ceremonies due a chief.

"He was reburied with that honor," Jones said. "And now we get another little step closer to healing that history."

Cut Nose and the 37 other Indians hanged in the largest mass execution in U.S. history were buried in a shallow mass grave, but their bodies were dug up the night they died for use in anatomical studies.

The remains of Cut Nose went to Dr. William Mayo, father of the brothers who founded the Mayo Clinic in Rochester.

"The first part of him that was reburied was the skull, which was found (several years ago) at the Mayo Clinic," Jones said. "It was on display in a doctor's office for a number of years."

Working with scientists at Hamline University in St. Paul, the council determined that it was Cut Nose's skull.

"People often asked what happened to the rest of him," Jones said. "Then you learn from an institution 700 miles away that they have another piece of him over there."

After an inventory mandated by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the Public Museum of Grand Rapids, Mich., this year identified one item in its collection never displayed as a piece of Cut Nose's skin. It had been tanned and tattooed with identifying marks.

At the request of the Lower Sioux Community of Morton, Jones went to Michigan to claim the remains.

Ernest Wabasha, who works on repatriation matters for the Lower Sioux, participated in the reburial.

"It was a good ceremony," he said. "But there are many more (specimens) that are in museums and collections around the country, so we still have work to do."

Cut Nose is mentioned twice in Kenneth Carley's "The Sioux Uprising of 1862," published in 1961 and republished in 1976 by the Minnesota Historical Society. He wrote that Cut Nose and other Indians stopped a group of fleeing white settlers near Fort Ridgely, but they were stopped from killing the whites by a Sisseton Dakota woman who had married a white Indian agent.

Carley also recounted how doctors, "quick to seize the rare opportunity to obtain subjects for anatomical study," dug up the bodies after the mass execution at Mankato. "Dr. William Mayo drew that of Cut Nose, and later his sons learned osteology from the Indian's skeleton."

The story is confirmed in "The Doctors Mayo," Helen Clapesattle's 1941 biography of the clinic founders, which portrays Cut Nose as he was seen by most whites at the time of the conflict and for many years after: "a fiend incarnate during the outbreak, the ringleader in all the most brutal outrages."

His body was taken to Le Sueur, where it was dissected by William Mayo in the presence of other doctors, and the skeleton "was cleaned and articulated for the doctor's permanent use."

The Grand Rapids museum never displayed the piece of skin, curator Eric Alexander said. It measured about 4 by 5 inches.

"It is not the sort of thing we would collect now," Alexander said.

Advised of the find, the Lower Sioux Indian Community submitted a claim, and the remains were given to Jones for return to the tribe.

"Making sure these people are put back in the earth is not always a feel-good thing," Jones said. "It's tough, looking at a piece of human skin. I don't want to see another piece of tanned human skin as long as I live.

"But it's part of a healing process. That was part of the burial ceremony, asking for forgiveness and healing to take place," he said.